


Without Eyes

by Ithil



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Challenge Response, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-11-02
Updated: 2010-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-29 11:17:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/686348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ithil/pseuds/Ithil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of stories written for the IY_Blind challenge project. Includes "Two Tribes" and "New Sky."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

This story takes place just before the final chapter of the manga. Kudos to Rumiko Takahashi and all her crew for giving us this fine story.

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It was after the choir trip. The bus had broken down and they'd all been stuck there until four in the morning. Most of the others had snuck off to some mischief after the chaperones had started to snore, but Kagome, Yuka and Hojo had all stayed on the bus, keeping each other awake by telling jokes and texting Eri and Ayumi about the sound the crickets made beside the road.

Time had passed and the stories had slowed. Ayumi was called away. Eri's answers had grown shorter and stopped. Yuka had closed her eyes for "just a minute." Kagome had yawned wide as a goose's egg, stretching both fists out to the misted windows.

Hojo had fallen asleep with his head on her shoulder.

It wasn't at all like the time Inuyasha had rested with his head in her lap, young Shippo, still a stranger at her shoulder, moving nervously at the sound of the spiderheads outside. For all that she could still touch the resting head with affection, it wasn't at all the same.

It was more like when she, Kaede and Sango would share the miko's small bed in the village in winter. Or like feeling Shippo circle down at the foot of her sleeping bag while Inuyasha pretended he wasn't watching over them from a nearby branch. Or Miroku, especially Miroku, on those nights he was too tired to grope or even joke with Sango before leaning his head back against Kirara and closing his eyes.

Miroku whom she loved but didn't love, couldn't trust but could.

She couldn't see Hojo's face in the shadows, but she could hear him breathing like a child. Now that all the sillier parts of herself had gone to sleep, now, she could just love him. Hojo, Yuka, Eri, Ayumi and the life they all had in this age. They weren't saving the world, but a person could just live in it and give each day some quiet meaning. They took their ordinary lives seriously, allowing Kagome to take hers seriously. They'd thought she was theirs, but it was only half true. They'd welcomed her into their tiny tribe without ever knowing that she walked with foreign secrets and she could admit, awake in the dark, that she loved them for it.

Even if saying it out loud would never do. Especially with Hojo. A boy like that, who'd adored her once. Over the years since the well had closed, his gifts and invitations had fallen off, but he'd always had a smile for her. Telling him that she loved him would be cruel.

Yuka slept with her throat open, neck bared to anyone who might swing open the door and step inside. She slept as if any danger in the world was far away and not looking for her. She slept like a girl without enemies. And Kagome remembered. She remembered that she, too, had no enemies here. In all the yawing emptiness of the road, the lights and the sounds of Japan at night.

There had never been a peace like this in the other world. There had been sweet mornings and moments of calm, but permeating all the blazing daylight, there was the knowledge that any of creature could attack at any time, tricked, corrupted, or made whole from his own body.

Kagome had never rested with a set of strange fingers brushing against the skin of her hip, never lain down with his arms around her waist or his kiss on her lips. Never had more than the scent of him or the thought of him pressed against her mind as the world slipped away.

But Naraku hadn't been dead then.

She'd sent him back to a world she hadn't known. More than anything, that was what kept her up at night. The sengoku jidai without a jewel, without Naraku, without a mission. She'd drawn friends around herself, around the both of them, but he was more than strong enough to push them back. In his pride or in his anger, he could push them back.

She trusted Miroku like she trusted the boy resting gently against her shoulder. Trusted Sango, sure as Yuka was stretched out on the seat across the aisle. Trusted Kaede like Eri's steady voice on the line. They wouldn't let Inuyasha throw himself away, not any more than the five of them would let Ayumi give up on journalism school, Hojo trip over his own naïveté, or Kagome give in to the restlessness of a woman half-lost.

She trusted them to try, even if success could not be certain.

Kagome touched Hojo's head, lightly, and listened to Yuka breathe as the night sky tightened around the windows.

It would have to do.

 

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drf24@columbia.edu


	2. Captive Audience

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing lasts forever. That doesn't mean it's time to give up.
> 
> IY_Blind September 2008: "Silk."

Long may Rumiko Takahashi's pen be sharp! I do not own Inuyasha.

This is something I wrote for the iy_blind September 2008 challenge. The theme was "silk."

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It built low, like the depression in the air before thunder, or the loom of a white wave about to crash. But build it did, rising and quaking and rumbling until it shook the very splinters of the house. It was a moan of pain, of anger, of about two hundred decibels.

"HWOO-OO-oo-OO-oo-OO-oo-OO-oo-OO-oo-OO-oo..."

Shippo rapped one clawed fist hard against the bathroom door, "Hey, some of us need to get in there too, you know!"

His answer was a muffled half-curse that could have been "shut up" or "turnip soup." Shippo felt safe assuming that the dog demon wasn't up for talking about food for once.

"This is your own fault, you know," he said, leaning his whole lanky self against the doorjamb. "Just because they call it 'Silk' doesn't mean you should eat a whole case of the stuff. And now your ass is stuck to that toilet seat just like that time I bought my first tube of superglue."

Something whacked the inside of the door hard enough to crack the fibers.

Shippo snickered out loud. Oho, but he hadn't had a good game of You Can't Get Me since he'd still been small enough to walk on twig branches without cracking them. Being a big tough eighth-level kitsune warrior had its advantages, but a guy could miss his squirrelly days. He ducked lightly away from the bathroom door and scooped up one of the empty plastic cups.

"'Cherry bonanza'?" he read out loud. "Funny, I'd have picked you for a banana man."

Another growl came out at him. Shippo laughed out loud.

"Remember when we all thought that drinking milk was gross?" he said conversationally into the closed door. "Now they mix a couple strawberries and—" his eyes narrowed into the label "—some fructose-intensified flavor syrup and suddenly you have to have five cups a week or your puny human pancreas falls out. I tell you, sometimes I think everything after 1989 was a mistake." He drummed his claws playfully against the door.

A low, unearthly voice crept through the doorframe like toxic waste seeping into the water supply. "I feel like everything I ever ate is trying to escape through my—" The words fell away before the evil sound of a boa constrictor being turned inside out.

"At least it beats the sixties." Shippo answered. "Remember Tang?" He shuddered.

"I swear, Shippo, if you don't shut your yaphole and get me some of that pink stuff..."

"I mean... the cars were nice," Shippo rattled on. "Built 'em out of steel in those days. Of course it was the Cold War, so everything had to be made like a torpedo—" he held his hands out in front of him in his best she'll-slap-me-twice-but-it's-worth-it combo pose "—and I do mean everything. It felt like a great joke of the universe that Miroku died four hundred years before Maidenform. Don't you agree?"

"Pink stuff, Shippo! Now!"

"Oh the meditations that man would have done trying to get Victoria to tell him her secret. It's a shame." Shippo turned his head from one side to the other. "You know..." he said, "I'd have asked you about this sooner, but I'm not the one who had the power to immobilize you with a word. I guess I just had to wait for you to decide that making your rectum explode with probiotic yogurt would be a good idea."

"Shippo, I am going to shove my foot so far up your—"

"What are you waiting for?"

"I don't know what you mean—" The bathroom's occupant made another guttural sound of pain. "—and it probably wouldn't be your goddamn business if I did."

"I mean she's been gone for almost four hundred years," Shippo said soberly. "And you know how much she meant to me; I miss her too, but Isn't it time you put yourself back out there?"

"Shippo," the voice growled out at him. "I've told you before, I just don't want to. 'Sides, it's not like I see you mooning over Ms. Right like the crow in that damned mouse movie that you love so much."

"Eh, music was good but the book was better."

"So why do you tape it every goddamned time it comes on?"

"I'm not the one on trial here," Shippo snapped back, ruffling his tail. "And what makes you think I don't have my share of lady friends? It isn't as if I can bring them back here with you moping about."

"I don't mo—GEEEEAAAAAGHHH!"

The fox demon took a step back.

"Look," Inuyasha growled back, "right after we defeated Naraku, when she was gone for all those years, I dealt with it. I missed her, I loved her, but I had you and the others and I had a job to do. It's the same now. She's gone and she's not coming back through that well no matter what, but I've got friends—"

"Kouga doesn't count. He still hates your lame ass."

"—Shut up. I've got friends and I've got a job to do, Shippo. I'm not waiting for anything. I'm living my life and a new wife's not in it. Maybe once we get through all the time she told me about I'll feel differently, but right now I don't."

"Fair enough," the fox demon answered back, "but it's not like you've got all the time in the world."

"And what do you mean by that?"

"I mean that by virtue of not being a kitsune, not only did you miss out on the redheaded good looks but your human body has, shall we say, matured over the years."

"You saying I'm old, runt?" There came a strong, fierce growl. "Open up this door and you'll see I can still kick your puffed-up tail!"

"With that going on in there? Hell no. What I'm saying is it's nineteen-ninety-fucking-two and they aren't exactly stocking parts for your model any—" Shippo's shoulders dropped. He felt light. Too light. "She's alive by now, isn't she?" he demanded. "She's some little kid somewhere, but she's alive."

The voice behind the door game a noncommittal grunt.

"Inuyasha," Shippo said, "Inuyasha you know you can't go and get her. If she doesn't go down that well— Hell, you were almost as sucky at raising me as you are as a roommate, but I like not being a slab of flab on Manten's fat ass!"

"Not going to go get her. Not the idea."

"Then what is the idea?" Shippo's mind was racing. "Once she goes down that well for the last time, she can be reincarnated, is that it?"

Something sounded rough and bitter on the other side of the door. It might have been a laugh. "Oh, runt... If some reincarnation could do me... Oh no, kid. Not even close."

"Then why? Why hold out this long?"

"I told you, kiddo, I ain't holding out. I ain't waiting for my dead wife to come back. This is what life is and it isn't so b..." Inuyasha's voice choked off.

Shippo pressed one ear against the door. "You all right, man? Look, I'm sorry, I brought it u—"

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!"

The fox demon clapped both hands over his ears, driving his nose as hard as he could into one elbow. "It's like a friggin' hurricane!!" he shrieked. "If you think you're skipping out on cleaning duty this week, you've got another think coming and you'd better the hell flush!"

"Just get me the pink stuff, Shippo."

"Pink stuff! Right!" the fox demon turned and fled.

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drf24 columbia . edu


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing lasts forever. That doesn't mean it's time to give up.
> 
> IY_Blind October 2010: "Show me Shippo all grown up."

I have decided to stop posting all my IY-Blind entries as separate stories (even though they are).

"Two Tribes," "Captive Audience" and the first chapter of "Mountainside" were all first published for an _Inuyasha_ fan community called IY_Blind. IY_Blind was founded by some fans who were frustrated by challenge communities where the voting tended to turn into popularity contests. This is why all IY_Blind entries are 100% anonymous until the winners are announced.

Every month there is a new challenge, and the winner gets to pick the next month's, so if you want me or any other IY_B writer to do your bidding, get over to http://community.livejournal.com/iy_blind/ !

(At this point you probably think that this is all a ploy to bring more contestants, voters, readers and spectators to IY_Blind, but this is not true. You can send me cookies as well!)

The October 2010 challenge was, "Show me Shippo all grown up."

 

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Inuyasha and Shippo are the property of Rumiko Takahashi. Further disclaimers follow.

 

"I told you this was a good idea. Just look at that sky."

"I'm more concerned with what's under it, runt," Inuyasha grunted.

Shippo and Ken exchanged a knowing look. Grunting meant that the half-demon approved. Grunting and destroying the supply pod with Tessaiga? That meant disapproval.

And it _was_ a good sky, because this _had_ been a good idea. The dusty, tan-streaked blue stretched from horizon to wide horizon like something out of one of the Old West movies that they'd played back in the twentieth. To the northwest, a sharp, craggy set of hills stabbed at a set of dirty white clouds. The plant life might have been scanty, barely enough to support the scabby, government-issue cow herds, but even that just brought out the rough-edged brand-newness of this place.

Inuyasha sniffed heavily as he walked down the gangplank, which squealed in protest. Shippo winced. It was a good thing this place looked promising. There was no way this heap was up to a return trip. It was almost a crime the way speculators took these old ships, barely spaceworthy, and patched them up, packing them clear to the titanium rafters with passengers for a one-way journey the hell out of dodge.

They'd let the other passengers disembark first, in part to get some privacy but mostly to let the stink disperse a bit. Eighty men, women and children packed into a space designed for a crew of five and light cargo got a little ripe after a three-month trip, especially when the showers had been taken out to make more space for more fares.

Shippo closed his eyes. It wasn't Musashi, but then nothing was. Nothing ever would be again. He looked over his shoulder at Inuyasha. He half expected the grizzled old half-demon to say how fortunate it had been that she'd died long before seeing what her kind had done to the world she'd loved, but it had been years since he'd stopped saying it. "Would've broken her heart," he'd used to say. But not any more.

"We should send for the others right away, Inuyasha," Ken was saying. "The clan should not be separated this long."

"I will decide what is best for our clan, boy," answered Inuyasha. "And when we're alone, you are to call me 'Dad.' I don't care if you look older than me."

Ken rolled his eyes, just like he had when he'd been a teenaged warrior wannabe under Uncle Shippo's tutelage. That had been the high days of the Tokugawa. He'd learned enough to teach his yonger brothers their swordcraft—and a few kitsune tricks—just in time for the war to restore Emperor Meiji. The empire of the modern age, with its railroads and its dreams... That was when they'd all truly known that Kagome's magical homeland was really on its way.

But it hadn't only brought sweet snacks and wheeled machines. It had brought so much. And it had taken away even more. The humans had conquered the world and then kept conquering it. The scent of miasma was driven out by gasoline and nitrogen fertilizers. Little by little, the rolling forests chopped down for farms, the great, aching freedom of the wild spaces gone, gone and then more gone until the remaining demons were shoulder to shoulder, even allied tribes going for each other's throats for living space.

It took a strong leader to keep a clan together, focused.

There was a reason why a kitsune boy had never gone back to live with his own kind. There was affection, to be sure, and gratitude, but the bottom line was that Shippo had always had an eye for self-protection. Inuyasha had grown into a leader with Kagome by his side as they raised their horde of children. It had been their happy ending.

Only the story hadn't had the good grace to end. First Kaede, then Sango and Kagome and finally Miroku had succumbed to mortality. Inuyasha had not been destroyed. He'd had Ken and his other sons and daughters and—by then—his first two grandchildren, both Souta and Izayoi having married full-blooded inuyoukai. And he'd had Shippo.

Kouga's wolves had fallen to infighting, the wildness in their blood rising up and breaking out through their humanlike skins until they went for each other's throats. Shippo would have liked to think that the great wolf had lasted longer than most, but they'd found his den long empty, clawmarks worn smooth by years of rain.

The Birds of Paradise had abandoned their nests, soft feathers scattered to the wind.

Totosoi's forge had gone cold. There had been a set of oxen tracks headed north, but they'd never found him.

Jinenji, on the other hand... Shippo and Ken's sister Sango had seen his body, gelatinous and black as pitch, seeping away into the stream that ran down the mountain where he and his human mother had once lived. That stream had flooded, raging hard, every single year since, always leaving disease behind. The humans suffered through it. All the plants that could have cured them were dead.

Eventually, it had gotten too close for humans too, but rather than finally fight that nuclear war that had promised to save demonkind with its desolation and its bodycount, they'd simply built their great ships ...and left.

And every youkai with any sense had gone with them. The others...

Some demons had decided to stay on Earth once the humans packed up and moved out. The sun was still shining, they said, and the earth, the barren, brown earth might one day revive and grow tall plants again. The idea that youki essence could only be fed by the fear of a thinking being? A myth, a holdover from more barbarous times. The Dog Lord himself, the great leader Sesshoumaru, had ascribed to this belief. Shippo could see him now, withered Jaken at his side, great ruff over his shoulder as he watched his half-brother board a human ship with his followers. He'd called him a whipped dog, a prideless whelp.

The'd never heard from him again. There had been no messages from Earth-that Was, not by the essence or the signal.

Shippo held in a shudder. He didn't know for sure; he didn't want to.

The core planets had seemed like a good bet at first, they'd had the best terraforming, the most natural atmospheres and had imported the biggest number of plant and animal species from Earth, but a few decades on Xenon had made it clear that the super-regulated life of "true civilization" was no proper life for a kitsune and his clan of inuhanyou friends. A fox belonged out in the woods, regardless of whether those woods were made out of trees or five hundred acres of empty dust.

Inuyasha's boots crunched dry dust specked with gravel. Here and there some hardy weed waited for rain. He stopped, buckling his lip into the old-man scowl that had become his baseline expression.

"Dad?" asked Ken.

Shippo watched while Inuyasha removed his shoes, clicking ten clawed toes against the new earth. Slowly, he nodded.

"Good ground," he said. "I think we can stand it here."

Shippo smiled. "They say it gets better in time. They say that after a while, whole forests grow. Even if they don't, we'll still have that sky. No one can ever take that from us."

Inuyasha shot him a look with one hard amber eye. For a second, Shippo could see clear through to the soul that had lost more, in love and land, than any other being yet living.

"We'll see," muttered Inuyasha. "We'll see."

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drf24 @ columbia . edu

 

( _Firefly_ and its setting and characters were invented by Joss Whedon and his team.)

**Author's Note:**

> IY_blind was a livejournal community created in response to a problem at other Inuyasha challenge projects. Many people felt that winners were being selected by popularity rather than by the quality of their work. At IY_blind, entries were posted anonymously and voters only found out who'd written what when it came time to announce the winners.
> 
> IY_blind evolved over time. Eventually, a secondary challenged developed out of guessing who'd written each piece. The prize for winning the monthly challenge was selecting the next one. Unfortunately, like many good things, IY_blind came to an end.
> 
> Posted to Archive of Our Own on 2-16-2013.


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